His Demons
by L J Groundwater
Summary: Complete one-shot. One of Doctor Cox's patients stirs up some bad, bad memories. PCA, because he had to. PerryJordan. Please read and review. Thanks.


I don't own Scrubs. If I did, I'd be much better off financially. This story just stemmed from a line in an episode… Please read, feel, and review. Thanks.

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"Leave me alone, Jordan."

The statement is taken as a plea, even though Perry tries very hard to make it come across as a warning. Jordon observes her unmoving, unblinking ex-husband, then ignores his wishes and sits down on the floor next to him, looking straight ahead, as he is, at nothing in particular on the sparsely decorated wall of his apartment.

"Whatcha drinking?"

"Scotch."

Ah, the anesthetic of choice. Jordan has seen this before, and now she looks at Perry's red-rimmed, glassy eyes and sees farther into them than anyone who hasn't gone through all of this a hundred times or more with him already. It's a hard, very hard, place for this man to go, but once he's there, it's even harder to get him to leave.

"Bad day at the hospital?"

Perry's jaw hardens. "The worst."

Jordan is concerned by Perry's shortness. She doesn't think he's being rude; she just knows that ranting and raving and carrying on is his way of getting bad things out of his system, and when he clams up and seeks out solitude he's in serious danger of imploding. "Wanna talk about it?" she asks, knowing what the answer will be.

"Nope."

_Bingo._

Jordan shrugs and gets up. "I think I'll join you," she says, heading to the drinks table. She puts some ice in a glass, then pours in some of the blessing and curse known as Scotch and sits back down next to Perry. She doesn't take a sip. After another few long seconds of silence, Jordan looks back again at Perry. Anger is dancing in his eyes; years of practice have taught her to see its quiet partner in this dangerous tango: pain.

_Cry, dammit,_ she commands him silently. Then she almost laughs out loud. Jordan and Perry were drawn together in the first place by their complete closed-offedness. Each with their own demons, each with their own ways of dealing with their somehow miserable lives. Crying and getting all girlie like DJ is not the answer for either of them. And yet, somehow, Jordan can't help wishing just now that Perry _could_ open up and get rid of this horrible thing that's poisoning him from the inside out. She likes to think she isn't a compassionate person, but it isn't her own satisfaction that's making her wish for Perry to show some sign of softness; it's what she tries very hard to avoid admitting to herself that she feels for this neurotic, half-crazy doctor: love. But that would make her vulnerable, and that's not what she wants people to think she's about.

They both take a sip. Jordan gently cups her glass in her hands; Perry's slams onto the glass table top. Having her here is driving him crazy; they both know it. But somehow, neither of them wants her to move.

"Are we going out for dinner tonight?" Jordan asks casually.

"I have to go back to the hospital."

"Oh." A bright thought—or at least, one intended to seem that way: "Maybe I should go with you. I'll let Jack play with the ventilators while I get some work done."

The reaction is swift, and revealing. "No. I don't want Jack near that place tonight." Another sip, another slam on the table.

"Oh. Why not?"

Perry turns his burning eyes toward Jordan, and just for a second she feels a thrill of actual fear in the pit of her stomach. She swallows it, purses her lips, and makes sure that she faces him stoically.

"Because I'm not letting my son be in the same zip code as the scum of the earth I'm treating there."

"You _always_ treat the scum of the earth there, Perry. What's so different from _any other time_ Jack's been there?"

"I _mean_ it, Jordan," Perry says, his voice more animated—angrier. "He's not going there."

"Okay, okay," Jordan relents; she never had any intention of going back to Sacred Heart tonight anyway. "Do you mind telling me why?"

"I told you," Perry says, then his voice suddenly drops back to a dull, defeated tone that his face is beginning to match: "I don't want there to be even the remotest chance that he'll end up near my patient."

Jordan bows her head as Perry takes another large swallow of Scotch. She wonders if this is the first, or the fifth, glass he's had.

"My useless, worthless, sorry-excuse-for-a-man, mongrel patient."

Jordan hadn't expected Perry to elaborate, but now that he has, she's intrigued, and just a little bit sad. She thinks she knows where this is heading now, at least. "You mean DJ?" she asks, knowing that young Doctor Dorian, whose initials she insists on getting backwards, isn't who he means at all. "Did the Janitor finally lay him out?"

Perry shakes his head as he scowls. "No, not him. As useless as I find him, sometimes Newbie actually has his place in that cesspool. I'm talking about the steaming pile of fermenting crap that came rolling in this morning."

"Sounds _very_ attractive," Jordan observes.

But Perry doesn't hear her. "Shouting slurred threats at the top of his hoarse voice, stinking of all kinds of alcohol, blood on his shirt—and only _some_ of it was gonna be his own. Then his sobbing wife comes in with their snot-nosed kid all _boo-hoo-hoo_, saying that her husband fell down the stairs. Well, unless he pulled the kid down with him, there's no reason for the boy to have that big ol' scratch on his arm and that black eye that extends halfway down his face. Oh, and did I mention the cigarette burn on the kid's hand? I don't even want to look at the loser, but he starts having a heart attack, probably brought on by all the screaming and carrying on, and I have to push the kid and the sobby wife out of the area so the emergency equipment can come barreling in, and we manage to make his old ticker beat again, which probably means he'll have another half-decent chance of batting the kid around again while mom pretends she isn't actually seeing anything and makes dinner and pours drinks for the bastard."

A long rant, and too revealing, though Perry shows no sign that he's aware of it. Jordan watches as he goes to guzzle the rest of his Scotch, only to discover that he has already done that. He looks for a split-second at her still-mostly-full glass and clearly considers taking it. But he doesn't, and instead stares at the bottom of his own, empty one.

Jordan knows Perry is seeing his own childhood in that glass, so tragically mirroring what he saw at the hospital. She lets the silence sit between them for a moment, when suddenly Perry laughs a short, incredulous snort. "You know, he nearly belted the kid in full view of everyone?" he tells her. He laughs again, still seeing something she can't as he looks at the wall. "In the middle of one of his more elaborate rages he actually raised his arm to backhand the boy right in front of us." He laughs. "Then Carla walked up and plunged a syringe into that loser's arm, which distracted him long enough for the kid to move out of range." He shakes his head. "She wasn't gentle, either. Carla's timing has always been impeccable."

"So you're going back tonight?" Jordan asks gently.

"Yeah. Kelso had me double-shifted today. I didn't want to, but, as usual, the old geezer isn't giving me any choices here."

"Double-shifted? So why are you—?"

"You know, Jordan, all I could think while I was trying to save his skin is how much better that kid's life would be if we just let the guy die."

Jordan's heart clenches. Savings lives is what Perry _does_; he absolutely obsesses about it. But saving it when he knows it's going to make someone else suffer even more is a hard road to travel. Slowly, she reaches out and softly brushes back some of the curls from his forehead. She repeats the motion as they bounce back in place, concentrating on being soothing, soothing… an anesthetic for his memories.

"As I was leaving, Carla said, 'You'll have to talk to him sometime, you know.' But I don't. I don't. I _don't _have to talk to anyone, any time, anywhere. All I have to do is treat the slob and make sure he doesn't die of my own negligence. But nowhere in the Hippocratic Oath does it say anywhere, anywhere, anywhere, that I have to engage in polite conversation with the patient or his well-meaning but totally blind spouse or suffering offspring. So no, I will not be talking to that man, and no one can make me do it. _They can't make me do it, dammit!_"

Jordan stops stroking, Perry's distress radiating from him in giant waves that leave her momentarily speechless. "You don't have to talk to him," she reassures him quietly.

"No, I just have to get him healthy enough to go back to making his family's life an absolute misery." Perry braces his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands.

"Per…"

"So help me, Jordan, if he says one word to me I'll rip all the monitors off his body and toss them out the window. I mean that, I really do."

"Kelso will have your ass for wasting hospital money," Jordan says.

"I know," Perry replies; "but the stuff would have been contaminated anyway." He falls silent. Jordan says nothing, waiting. Finally, Perry's quiet voice drives straight through her as he admits, "I don't know if I can do this, Jordan. I don't know if I can treat this guy."

Jordan hates how much Perry is suffering, and even more so, she hates the man who made him feel this way, way back when, and the woman who let it all happen. She knows it isn't right; she knows all about abused families. But looking at this crumbling man beside her right now, she can't rationalize any of it. "You're a doctor, Perry," she says. "You'll do what you have to do."

"My mother was a mother," Perry says, his voice dangerously close to breaking, "and she didn't do what _she _had to do."

Jordan longs to hold him, to comfort him, but she wonders how he would take it. She wonders how _she_ would take it. She wonders, as an aside, if having Jack has brought out this nurturing instinct in her, then dismisses the thought as Perry's knuckles turn white when he grips his empty glass even harder. "So, what are you going to do?" she asks.

As if on cue, Perry's pager goes off. Without blinking he pulls it from his waist and looks at it, then grimaces. He releases the glass and stands up. "I've gotta go."

"Perry, you've been drinking."

"It's the only way I can face this, Jordan."

"Let me drive you, then."

"I'll take a cab."

"Okay, you do that. I'll pick you up when you're done, all right?"

"All right." Perry Cox looks around almost aimlessly. Somewhere… his cell phone is somewhere. Finally, he sees it in his palm and just lets out a frustrated breath before heading to the door. "I'll see you later."

"Perry," Jordan calls from the floor. Her ex-husband stops in his tracks, carelessly looks back at her, waiting. "It's all over now," she says gently. "Your father's gone. You're past it all now. You can do anything you set your mind to."

At this, Perry lowers his head, a small smile quirking the edges of his lips, as though what Jordan has said amuses him. "He's not gone, Jordan," he says. "My father has thousands of ghosts out there, carrying on his work. And every time I see one, I'm ten years old all over again. As long as there are people like that jackass at the hospital, it'll never be over. And even then, I'm not so sure."

Then he opens the door, and steels himself to go back to the hospital. He's a doctor, and he'll do what a doctor has to do. No matter how small he feels inside.


End file.
